Video: Capturing stop motion footage

Now kind of piggybacking on the whole concept of capturing video, I want to introduce you to the concept of stop motion footage. Basically, stop motion is when you take a series of pictures and you put them together as if they were video. This is used primarily for two purposes: number one, it's used for time-lapse photography. So let's say you want to make a video of the sun coming up. Well that would take several hours and now we want to select something for several hours like that. So what you do is you take a picture maybe every 20 minutes or every half hour or what have you and then as you put those pictures together, it would be a short movie of the sun coming up quickly or flowers blooming or whatever it may be. The other purpose for stop motion is for creating inanimate objects moving around.

Digital video is a medium that is now available to almost everyone. It can be captured on anything from a mobile phone to a high-definition camera, and published anywhere from YouTube to Blu-ray discs. In Premiere Elements 4 Essential Training, Adobe Certified Instructor Chad Perkins explores all the video editing capabilities of Premiere Elements 4. Chad starts with a real-world sample project, then covers techniques for importing and editing video; and adding effects, transitions, and animation. He concludes with a final project incorporating all the steps, including exporting and posting. Exercise files accompany the course.

Capturing stop motion footage

Now kind of piggybacking on the whole concept of capturing video,I want to introduce you to the concept of stop motion footage.Basically, stop motion is when you take a series of pictures and you put them together as if they were video. This is used primarily for two purposes: number one, it's used for time-lapse photography. So let's say you want to make a video ofthe sun coming up. Well that would take several hours and now we want to select something for several hours like that.So what you do is you take a picture maybe every 20 minutes or every half houror what have you and then as you put those pictures together, it would be a short movie of the sun coming up quickly orflowers blooming or whatever it may be. The other purpose for stop motion is for creating inanimate objects moving around.

So if you had a little toy robot, maybe you can make it move up and down and just take pictures of it periodically and put them alltogether to make a movie. Here's how you do that in Premiere Elements. I am going to click on Get Media and go to Stop Motion. Now I couldalso do this from the Capture window just by clicking the Stop Motion button at the top here. And you could do this in two ways: You can click on Create New Stop Motion and that will use the video of your camera that's hooked up and whenever youfind a frame that you want to take, select Grab Frame here down the bottom.

Alternatively, you can drag in a piece of footage that already exists, a video that already exists, and grab frames from that tocreate a new stop motion.Now going into stop motion capture is really beyond the scope of this training. There are all sorts of really advanced optionssuch as Onion Skinning and other things. The Help has some very detail information about Stop Motion.But I wanted you to be aware of this concept. I think it's an amazing feature of Premiere Elements. I'm sitting here,I use Premiere Pro, a very advance professional level of video editing applicationand there is not these great stop motion tools there and I'm kind of jealous frankly.

But there are some great tools here to be able to use with Stop Motion and that's all I want yoube aware of and also what Stop Motion is. In the next movie,we are going to look at other ways besides capturing to import footage or import media into Premiere Elements.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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